Main menu

Search form

In this issue of Mute we look at the systemic requirement to appear, to have an identity, to become intelligible - as an individual, a face, a body, a set of affects, a data-set within biopolitical capitalism. This recurrent demand to appear is both extracted and seduced out of us by the apparatuses of state and spectacle; the system of property and images; the simultaneous need to harness labour and manage the unemployed. In this issue we also look at the deeper shifts in capitalism which trigger the intensifying management of life; a crisis of abundance is brought on by industrial and technological developments converting the majority of the earth's inhabitants into a ‘surplus' population to be managed and ‘warehoused' in jails, workfare schemes or that open prison known as Web 2.0.